Posted
by
Zonkon Saturday April 23, 2005 @02:25PM
from the nth-dimensional-creature dept.

loid_void writes "The software and services used to read XML-based news feeds are continuing to branch out as the syndication method gains popularity on the Web." From the article: "More and more companies are starting to use internal content distributed in the form of RSS...Having this content delivered internally in a secure manner is really kind of the sweet spot for [enterprises] right now."

* It will be no-time before we start to see fake articles and whatnot directing us to fake merchants and fake bank sites trying to phish us and other nonsense
* Without signed articles / Signed RSS, there is no-way, other than finding and verifying the original content source, to ensure that a feed is authentic

Am I missing something? As I understand it, RSS is fundamentally immune to phishing-type attacks because it must be requested from the server, ("pull") rather than being passively received like email ("push"). AFAICT, the only ways to receive fraudulent RSS feed items are to a) sign up for a fraudulent RSS feed, or b) receive feeds from a server that gets cracked. If this is true, then it seems that the need for signed RSS is pretty minimal.

Yup, I've been thinking about doing something like this at the college I work for. Closest events in the calendar, any "broadcast" info, etc. Many at the college use Mozilla, so making it the home page (or call it from the shortcut so tehy can have their own home page) for the browser or that page that is oh-so-annoying in part of the mail/news window. I typically disable it in the prefs, but if it was info that actually pertained to me/my job/etc then I'd probably keep it.

I was just working on a simple php script to pull rss feeds but found most sites only give title, link and description details for the items... why no date? seems nuts./. does provide a date however, the loverly people.

The lightbulb didn't come one for me until I tried a really nice RSS reader. It's provides a way to skim large amounts of information looking for nuggets in a very small amount of time. (In my case, it was NetNewsWire [ranchero.com]). In my opinion the RSS phenomenon is an example of information-consumers re-routing around bogosity, such as poorly designed sites and intrusive advertisements. You could either take control over how you consume information, or you can be a gullet with an upwardly-open maw at the end of a

Considering RSS fits into the same part of the "transportation" equation as HTML. The above isn't saying that much. Control is what you make it out to be.

The semantic differences between the two make all of the difference. RSS is entirely data, wherease HTML is a mix of data and presentation (not necessarily, but as practiced). The bogosity comes when someone uses HTML's presentation features to force bogosity in your face.

I agree. RSS is just an arbitary standard. It IS fine for syndication of headlines, but then again, so is a text file -- remember the old textmode.txt files for syndicating headlines?

I should say that at least RSS was fine for syndicating headlines, in it's 0.91 incarnation, but now, as it "progresses" RSS is becoming increasingly lame as it becomes more and more complex because some fools think it should take the place of html, and so they've added the ability to carry, yes, html, so they can download wh

OK, I guess I wrote that too fast, screwed it up a bit. My point is that many think RSS can somehow be a superior substitute for html. But in order to make it such, they have to add such layers of complexity that even html is far superior in terms of economy and ease of creation...

There are things that RSS is NOT good for. Like, sending and receiving email or most forms of office communications.

I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your analysis, there, Flexible.

The point here is not that RSS should be used for sending and receiving email. Rather, the point is that email leads to lots of problems in office communications...too much valuable knowledge ends up scattered in various inboxes, unavailable to the organization as a whole. Or even worse than that, you end up with a bajillion revisions of miscellaneous documents flying around as attachments.

A much better idea would be to deprecate email as it is currently used, and actually capture intra-office communication in some issue-tracking system, wiki, or other appropriate system.

Where I work we started doing this with JIRA [atlassian.com] and Confluence [atlassian.com], both of which offer RSS feeds so that you can stay up-to-date on the changes within those systems. The combination is powerful, and I recommend it without hesitation.

If you have problems with different version of documents in your organization perhaps you should use a version control system like CVS or Subversion

Baby steps, Taladar. That's the way to make progress. It's much easier to get an organization to swallow the idea of capturing communication if you sneak up on them. Issue-tracking systems and wikis can be set up with email gateways so that many people don't know that they're using them. It's much easier than trying to convince management that everybody i

email leads to lots of problems in office communications...too much valuable knowledge ends up scattered in various inboxes, unavailable to the organization as a whole.

If you're that concerned about how scattered your email is, you should look into Google Search with Mozilla hooks. With one search you can find files, chat (Trillian), web history, and email. Now you really don't have to care where you file your email away. Document versioning is a whole different story and you should be using a cent

A much better idea would be to deprecate email as it is currently used, and actually capture intra-office communication in some issue-tracking system, wiki, or other appropriate system.

It'd be much cooler if you were named Clarke, so I could say "welcome to 2001" all sarcastic-like; now all I have to work with is Gateway, and nobody would get it anyway. But, sure, capturing e-mail is nothing new, and good lord, we've been tracking our communications as threads on a private NNTP server for almost 20 years

I gotta tell ya... my evdo-coverage.com website took off after i started blogging. Thank GOODNESS or what ever the MIS equivalent is..:) for RSS... As far as news... Turner and CNN had it right.. people want to know whats up. 24hours of world news changed the world.

now... how about 24 hours of specialized news for EVERY industry... carve our your niche now... theres room for everyone... by the way.. if anyone as a wireless internet related blog... i'd love to syndicate you at http://wirelessinternetcoverage.com [wirelessin...verage.com]... let me know.. we'll be putting a news section on the site

Having this content delivered internally in a secure manner is really kind of the sweet spot for [enterprises] right now.

I'll bite. How do they make it secure?

In particular, I have a LAMP application that stores both public and private data. We make RSS feeds of public data available to all, but would like to also have private date available on RSS after a user authenticates in some way. How are others handling authentication? Just leave it up to Apache?

I'm psyched that safari will now inform me of when new stories are broken - so I don't have to check the sites myself. This seems like it will save me a lot of time; unless I end up subscribing to rss feeds from hundreds of sites.

People are also starting to podcast all sorts of crasy stuff, like videos. Making vLogPodcasts. (And screwing up my playlists with videofiles).

RSS is just another great way of distributing news. Expecially podcasting it with simple programs you just keep running so then down anything new when it arives.

Internally in companies I can see the usage as a "message of the day" sort of thing where anything everyone needs to se is posted. Instead of cluttering up peoples inboxes it's all gathered a centrel spot and people can update by browsing the RSS feed.

Internally in companies I can see the usage as a "message of the day" sort of thing where anything everyone needs to se is posted. Instead of cluttering up peoples inboxes it's all gathered a centrel spot and people can update by browsing the RSS feed.

I prefer E-Mail for this. For pack-rats it allows a paper trail. Having a central feed makes it too easy to re-write history.

"How many people, like myself, found out about this story because of Slashdot's RSS feed?"

I have a little app called side-bar that shows me stuff throughout the day. It frequently downloads RSS feeds and comics and displays them. I don't imagine it'll be the biggest hit ever, but it's kinda nice to glance over and see new headlines etc. That's the nice thing about RSS, it's a standard so I can keep adding stuff to it.

Do remember that FidoNET, from July of 84, is a year and change older than Usenet, which properly starts during UUN's Great Renaming in 1986, and that some geezers still think it's better designed.

(Before anyone flips out that UUN was from 1979, please remember that the debate is over network architecture, and that UUN used UUX/UUCP; NNTP, which is the architecture to which parent refers, is first proposed in February of 1986 [faqs.org], and doesn't see wide-spread use until late 87/early 88.)

Goddammit, I'm confused - what exactly makes RSS different from any of these other standards out there for passing off documents? I mean, I realize it makes a good feed and such, but really, there's nothing involved that screams make-or-break. The same with XML, and all of these other buzzword bullshit standards. Can someone actually give me a purpose to use RSS for anything other than circulating feeds?

Buh what? Are you seriously proposing that recordable optical discs are less rigorously standardized than Internet markup schemes? I direct you to the DVD Forum [dvdforum.org] which employs rather a lot of scientists and engineers in the pursuit of their standardization duties. By comparison the RSS community is a bunch of cavemen with stick drawings.

Let's see. If you were given the assignment to "parse a web page for data", what would you do? Hell, let's make that "parse anything for data". The first thing you'd do is that you'd find out some tell-tale signs of where information starts and ends. This could be different on different sets of data, or it could be consistent; on a web page, it'll almost certainly be inconsistent between these pages. So what RSS (and Atom, another similar but more extensive format with the same goal that falls under the sam

Let's see. If you were given the assignment to "parse a web page for data", what would you do? Hell, let's make that "parse anything for data". The first thing you'd do is that you'd find out some tell-tale signs of where information starts and ends. This could be different on different sets of data, or it could be consistent; on a web page, it'll almost certainly be inconsistent between these pages.

Um, sorry, those are what XHTML, OWL and RDF are for. RSS does not arise to combat this.

My major point wasn't arguing that RSS is the shit for parsing data but that it's easy and popular enough to re-use while being widely supported for delivering serial data. Why did I say "serial data"? Because that's what it's being used for. Why did I say that it's useful for notification? Because that's what it's being used for.

Very few things inside of any RSS spec dictate that any RSS feed must be fetched periodically (there are some more or less standard elements to specify when or how often the fee

We found a way to use RSS in porn, which I'm amazed noone else is doing yet. I run a BDSM porn site, we provide two RSS feeds for the weekly updates. One is for nonmembers, and links to a preview of each update, the other is for members, linking to the update itself. Since people still have to authenticate to get to the actual content, we don't have to worry about authenticating the members' feed.

This saves hassle for subscribers and browsers, since they don't have to keep checking back to see if we've updated, plus maybe saves a bit of bandwidth for us. Win for everybody.

You compare RSS to Usenet...why? They're not the same thing, and aren't meant to be. Usenet runs on a different protocol; requires a different method of viewing it. And the main point of Usenet is discussion and communication, not content syndication. Its a tool for people to discuss and communicate with each other, and not for content providers to syndicate their content.

You mention that RSS has no means of viewing older content, and again I'd say its not meant for that. It's meant to be used to show wha

Maybe RSS is not meant for viewing older content, but I see no reason why I shouldn't use a uniform interface for all news.

When I'm traveling over the weekend, I don't want to scan all news sites manually, just becaues RSS only provides for the newest 20 articles or so.

An alternative to a static RSS feed that gets updated with every new article would be an RSS feed that you access with a HTTP query with parameter to tell it when you last checked. That way the server could give you a list of all new artic

"(a) It doesn't matter *who* wants the features. What matters is that they aren't there."

I don't mind new features, provided they're optional. However, RSS doesn't SUCK for lack of them. RSS does it's job. It provides a summary of NEWS, not information archives. Imagine being forced to download a bunch of information YOU DON'T WANT just because you want to get updates from the site. Optional? Fine. Whatever.

"With email you have your browser auto-enter you mail-address (if your browser has that fe

Imagine being forced to download a bunch of information YOU DON'T WANT just because you want to get updates from the site. Optional? Fine. Whatever.

That's why with NNTP you get only the headlines first. If you want you can see the content (like the article description). If you like the description, click the http link in the description and read the article in your browser.

If there were apps for NNTP to do what RSS apps do with RSS feeds, then the "logging in to usenet" would be as invisible as "fetching the RSS feed".
When using NNTP you would need a NNTP library, for RSS you just need HTTP support. The provider just puts the file on his apache, and the client just needs to send an HTTP request. And no firewall problems whatsoever. Simple.
I don't see the "complexity" in XML here. RSS is actually really simple to parse. I don't know the NNTP protocol in detail, but I doubt

Enterprise communication and RSS make a really excellent combination. Feed readers are a dime a dozen or very simple to build. RSS hosting requires little more than a web server which means damn near everyone with a workgroup server or even a retasked don't-touch-this-workstation-or-else server can get in on the act.

Many readers support SSL and HTTP authentication which means connections to private feeds is relatively secure, moreso than most organizations e-mail systems. Having a small RSS reader running

Didn't we just read about how PR begets bullshit news stories [paulgraham.com]? Case in point: TFA.
Really, there's nothing but crap in that article. Taking a step back, it looks like it has a lot to do with Rojo's launch and a bit to do with NewsGator.
Of course, we all know the best aggregator is going to be Gmail...once it trickles down. For now, Bloglines [bloglines.com] will suffice.
And no, reading/subscribing to hundreds of feeds does not take more time than actually visiting all the sites. What the hell?

RDF [w3.org] (Resource Description Framework) is a meta-language, like XML. Except it's not even really a language, it's a model. Extra confusing because there are different syntaxes available, one of which is XML.

RSS 2.0 [harvard.edu] (Really Simple Syndication, I think) is what most people are talking about when they say RSS these days. Based on the original RSS 0.9x format, some people complain it's underspecified.

RSS 1.0 [resource.org] (RDF Site Summary) is a completely different specification, using the same basic concept & elemen

I found a tool for reading rss-feeds with a bayesian filter on it so that you only get to see the items you're interested in. After learning 100-200 items it works pretty wel. The program is called 'sux0r' and can be found here [sourceforge.net].
For those who like to give it a try, check my site [vanheusden.com].